11 Ways Tomorrow's Internet Will Change Everything

In a long essay for cerebral Web magazine The Edge David Gelernter explores
the future of the Internet, which he says is about to take on a far
more significant role in human society. "No moment in technology history
has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now," he writes. His
predictions--and warnings--have set off a wider debate about what the
Internet does and how we interact with it.

The Cloud Will Take
Over Gelernter sees cloud
computing eclipsing personal machines. "Because your information
will live in the Cloud and only make quick visits to your personal
machines, all your machines will share the same information
automatically; a new machine will be useful the instant you switch it
on; a lost or stolen machine won't matter — the information it contains
will evaporate instantly."

Perfect Understand of 'Now' Gelernter writes, "if this is
the information age, what do our children know that our parents didn't?
The answer is 'now.' They know about now." He explains, "The
Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many
different places at one moment in time," giving near-total information
about the present moment. But that obsessive focus on "now" could "drown
out" any understanding of past or future as a means of context.

Will
It Replace Religion? The American Scene's James Poulos worries that an all-knowing, all-containing
Internet could be used to replace God in peoples' lives. "The attempt to
escape the good judgment of God — both as a consequence of our being
and its cause — leaves us with two choices: the judgment of particular
humans and the judgment of the System," he writes. "[T]his realization
has fueled secular unitarian universalist projects since Saint-Simon,
Comte, and Hegel."

Computers Get Bigger, Not Smaller In a
shift away from tiny smart phones, Gelernter predicts giant
screens hanging on your wall. "You will sit perhaps seven feet away from
the screen, in a comfortable chair, with the keyboard and controls in
your lap."

Web Will Kill CollegesGelernter says classes
will be exclusively online, with no need for a physical campus. "Good
news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a
few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses)."

Complete
Loss Of Privacy It's a possibility, warns Gelernter, that the total
integration of our lives into Twitter-like programs "will make it even
easier than it is today for software to learn the details of your life
and predict your future actions. The potential damage to privacy is too
large and important a problem to discuss here. Briefly, the question is
whether the crushing blows to privacy from many sources over the last
few decades will make us crumple and surrender, or fight harder to
protect what remains."

Corporations as Public/Private Arbiters
The Postmodern Conservative's James Poulos worries. "I
would point out that the essentially erotic interest Americans
seem to have in abandoning the public/private distinction is a lot
different from the essentially monetary interest some American
corporations have in getting as many of us to do that as possible," he
writes. "The implications of a shift toward official/unofficial life,
and away from public/private life, are profound."

Fame
Replaced By Micro-Fame The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti
predicts, "I doubt the Oscars will exist in forty years. By then the
nature of entertainment will change so quickly, fame will be
distributed so randomly, film will be so globalized and so easy to make,
that even this most self-congratulatory of industries will have trouble
finding reasons to produce a three-and-a-half hour network television
awards program."

'Lifestreams' Will Be Central Medium
"Twitter, et al, are just glimpses of what is to come," writes Wired's Kevin Kelly.
"In the borderless, edgeless, centerless, placeless mists of the Net,
the only dimension that seems to remain true and absolute is time, and
so it seems prudent and practical to organize data/things/events/stuff
along this constant and coincidentally very personal and experiential
dimension."

Return to Pre-Modern 'Dream Logic'Gelernter concludes, "Pushing
the multi-mega-ton jumbo jet of human thought-style backwards a few
inches, back in the direction of dream logic, might be the Internet's
greatest accomplishment. The best is yet to be."

Will We
Control It? Journalist Nicholas Carr doubts it. "There are
times when human beings are able to correct the bias of a technology.
There are other times when we make the bias of an instrument our own.
Everything we've seen in the development of the Net over the past 20
years, and, indeed, in the development of mass media over the past 50
years, indicates that what we’re seeing today is an example of the
latter phenomenon. We are choosing nowness over ripeness."

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